tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post7068429773251687407..comments2015-03-02T08:15:11.963-05:00Comments on In the Middle: Signaling to Each Other from Inscrutable Depths: A Response to Gabrielle's Spiegel's "'Getting Medieval': History and the Torture Memos"Jeffrey Cohenhttps://plus.google.com/110433684739546897626noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-82168410026686850122009-04-04T14:48:00.000-04:002009-04-04T14:48:00.000-04:00Just came across this: "Certainly, history may see...Just came across this: "Certainly, history may seem to be fundamentally an illusion, but an illusion without which in temporal reality no insight into the essence of things is possible. For today's man that mystical totality of 'truth', whose existence disappears particularly when it is projected into historical time, can only become visible in the purest way in the legitimate discipline of <A HREF="http://glossator.org" REL="nofollow">commentary</A> and in the singular mirror of philological criticism."Nicola Masciandarohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-27173297754147827592009-04-02T10:29:00.000-04:002009-04-02T10:29:00.000-04:00Eileen, I'm with you on the need for a more nuance...Eileen, I'm with you on the need for a more nuanced understanding/use of the relationship (or being-with, or however you want to figure this multiplicity) of 'past' and 'present,' but the question remains:<BR/><BR/>what do we <I>as medievalists</I> have to offer in particular? Is there any particular reason to favor the medieval past in making these connections with the present, re-opening the lost opportunities of the past, tracking certain habits of thought, etc.? <BR/><BR/>I don't see it. What I do see is that we are, of necessity, specialists, but we are also interested in other stuff, so we use our specialty to think through that other stuff. <BR/><BR/>I'm not sure that the medieval ever offers us the best filter for thinking through the (polychronic) present; I think it's likely as good as any; and for certain projects, it's probably worse.Karl Steelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-59809911312875582342009-03-26T18:37:00.000-04:002009-03-26T18:37:00.000-04:00Jeffrey: thanks so much for your comments here. Ye...Jeffrey: thanks so much for your comments here. Yes, I remember Spiegel's and Freedman's essay on "the rediscovery of alterity in north american medieval studies" very, very well; if this weblog [and I] had been around in 1998 when that article first appeared, I would have written a long post explaining all the reasons *that* article upset me, too. I thought about mentioning it here, but then decided I would just hone in on Spiegel's most recent thoughts on what she thinks medievalists should, and should not, be doing *as medievalists*. But I think the two pieces are certainly related relative to what might be called prescriptive calls regarding what supposedly should or should not be the focus of "proper" medieval studies. The very notion, in even its most minimalist descriptions, of a "proper" medieval studies distresses me, but of course we've covered that ground here quite a bit.<BR/><BR/>What I'm *really* grateful for in your comments here is how you raise [again] the issues of simultaneity and metaphor. I was so worked up in my post at defending some medievalists' present-minded scholarship against the *charge* of analogy [in Spiegel's mind, a "weak" instrument of interpretation] that I completely neglected to also ask, "what's so wrong with analogy/metaphor again?" In fact, as I was struggling to conclude the post [and literally, it was a struggle, as I didn't know how or on what point to conclude] I actually wrote another final paragraph [which I then deleted] that directed us back to the conclusion of your post on Michael Chabon's visit to GWU, where you wrote [beautifully] of his and Edward P. Jones's fiction:<BR/><BR/>"The Known World and The Yiddish Policemen's Union envision histories that never were, geographies that fade from every map as their stories close. Chabon and Jones conjure pasts that have never been, create time only to lose that time, and yet these imagined histories are in a way more real than the present we inhabit, more truthful than any now can possess."<BR/><BR/>I wanted to see if I could bring us around again to the issue you raise in your comments here, via Serres, that one way of approaching both history, and art, or history-as-art, would be to consider everything as absolutely simultaneous and to refuse to separate the "items" of history from each other--whether by temporal or other lines--and instead, to draw enabling "conjunctions" between them [could we also call these "conjunctures," as the Annalistes did?]. This is a type of art, like Chabon's and Jones's fiction, that draws maps that could only ever fade as our narratives close [as you say], but which have a palpable material reality [and even "truth"], nevertheless, one that is "historical" and not just "fabulist." The only way, it seems to me, to break through the schemas of time that have such a strangulating hold on the ways we either are, or are not, allowed to "order" historical events [and to draw "meaning" from that ordering] is through the imagination--especially through the metaphor which, as you say, helps us to carry meanings across the chasms of time [chasms that may, moreover, as again you say, may be imagined to be deeper than they really are].<BR/><BR/>We do not need just the imagination, however; we can also just get up and move around--in geography, I mean. Don't we already understand, through authors such as Chakrabarty and Charles Taylor [e.g. his "Social Imaginary" book] that our so-called "modernity" moves at different speeds in different places? I spent the bulk of today driving through the back-roads of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, heading toward Bennettsville [a place forsaked by everyone and everything if ever there was one] in order to visit a prison [don't ask]. What I saw along the way and in Bennettsville also was a kind of post-apocalyptic future or a pre-industrial or never-industrial past [sans persons: I am speaking of landscapes, architecture, abandoned houses and factories, boarded-up buildings, working and non-working small farms, etc.; Bennettsville itself was half-boarded up, half-stuck in the 1950s, but this is also an illusion]: the *idea* of both seemed to flicker back and forth in front of me. Of course, at the same time, everywhere I went, I was really in the present.<BR/><BR/>Nicola: thanks so much for those extra links to Harman's work: wonderful!Eileen Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-65899258094152765022009-03-26T13:07:00.000-04:002009-03-26T13:07:00.000-04:00The fact of the matter is, although many will not ...<I>The fact of the matter is, although many will not allow it, all scholarly studies are really excavations, in one form or another, of the site of the Now, which has folded within it, all of time.</I><BR/><BR/>Here, here. now, Now.<BR/><BR/>Just in case it didn't cross the radar of your Now, I think you would enjoy listening to Harman discuss his work in relation to Latour and Heidegger <A HREF="http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/informationSystems/newsAndEvents/2008events/HarmanLatour.htm" REL="nofollow">here</A>. Deals, in a delightfully lucid and synthetic way, with *local occasionalism*, which is certainly a model for how you are situating things here; he also says a few things about time.<BR/><BR/>Also, <A HREF="http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/archives/2009/03/memento_tabi_re.html" REL="nofollow">Memento Tabere: Reflections on Time and Putrefaction</A> is an amazing meditation.<BR/><BR/>I will likely end up doing something in relation to this material for my 'Grave Levitation: Being Scholarly' at KZoo.<BR/><BR/>“In every Instant being begins; round every Here rolls the ball.<BR/>There. The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.”Nicola Masciandarohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-88526194602682446652009-03-26T08:26:00.000-04:002009-03-26T08:26:00.000-04:00Thanks for this post, Eileen, which so deeply enga...Thanks for this post, Eileen, which so deeply engages with and furthers conversations we have been having on this blog for quite some time. I especially like that you returned to Kofi's post.<BR/><BR/>Spiegel has always been rather stark about what the Middle Ages might be in relation to modernity. Do you remember that AHR essay of hers, "Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies"? Co-written with Paul Freedman and published in 1998, the article surveyed the old way of explicating the continuity of the medieval with the modern, then identified the postmodern turn in medieval studies with a fascination with otherness as being almost the totality of what the Middle Ages could be about. My favorite line:<BR/><BR/><EM>"Subjects once marginalized are now reintroduced as centers of concern: incest (and incest as the model of culture, culture itself being seen as the space in which the dangers of identification or indistinction, the very dangers inherent in the situation of incest, are played out), masochism, rape, transvestism, even postcolonialism."</EM><BR/><BR/>Not a lot of work is cited, but the Cultural Frictions conference at Georgetown looms large in the footnotes (thus the incest part is Lesley Dunton Downer's piece).<BR/><BR/>Anyway, what strikes me about this essay -- and the one you've quoted from so amply here -- is the unspoken insistence that an "either/or" structures the relationship between temporal periods: continuity OR hard edged alterity. Why can't we have both? Or why can't we give up on this periodizations that segregate and make easy what is intertwined and incalcitrant? <BR/><BR/>Michel Serres has a great line in his interview with Bruno Latour about how all great works are simultaneous. He refuses to separate his Lucretius and his Verlaine from his chaos theory: he refuses to do anything but link, create enabling conjunctions. Metaphor is his favorite concept, and not a source of danger (by the way, another propensity of totalizing arguments is to speak ominously of the danger inherent in what otehr people are doing): metaphor is what literally carries something across a chasm -- and likely a chasm that is assumed rather than actual.Jeffrey J. Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com